Friday, August 06, 2004

Friday, August 6, 2004 - Zoo Fun

I took the little ones to the zoo today. We had a blast. I did something there that I don't usually do - buy some of their crappy concession food. Oh, wait, that's true (it was nasty pizza), but that's not what I meant. The Buffalo Zoo has quite a few of their smaller animal exhibits indoors. It's not a pleasant place to be because it's dark, gloomy, and stinky, so I usually don't go in the buildings. Well, I did today, and boy, was I surprised! They redid almost everything in there. They got rid of the feline house entirely, moved the primates into larger, mostly outdoor exhibits, and replaced the tiny little displays of small mammals with several larger multi-species displays of certain ecosystems.

It made me really happy. So many of those animals were living in just awful conditions before. They weren't being mistreated or anything; their living space was horrid. The best thing about some of the new displays is that you can literally be a pane of glass away from an animal. Here, allow me to illustrate...

That's not through a zoom lens - it's from a few inches away. Cool, huh?